There’s a recent trend of what people are calling “vibe coding”, where non programmers are having AI write code for them. People are using it to make all sorts of little pieces of micro-software that help them in their life, from websites, to full on games.
Is it just me, or is Obsidian perfect for this? Imagine a future alongside blockbuster plugins like dataview and omnisearch, people use AI design their own plugins specifically for their vault. Even non coders. Ridiculously, gratuitously personalized. They don’t need to be sharable, but someone else could just have AI build their own?
Has anyone tried such a thing? I’m not exactly the ideal use case because I’m a pretty competent Python programmer, though I believe that Obsidian plugins are written in TypeScript / JS, neither of which I know, so I guess I kind of count.
I support that kind of coding as long it has some learning curve. Which, in a lot of cases, doesn’t have it.
You mentioned you’re a Python programmer, educated or self-learned; it doesn’t matter. You’re a programmer. A programmer has mileage for building an application, service, or function. Know the structure and all small details, like commenting code and documenting it (for more significant projects).
So, when “you” decide to create a plugin (sorry, if you already have it ) … “I” will not be afraid to maintain it for “next generation of Obsidian users” once Obsidian users are over your head
But things that scare me are that there are / will be plenty of plugins, which will not be able to maintain as they are / will be created via “vibe coding”.
Vibe coding is an AI-dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned …
I admit that I become lazy at commenting code, so I (if it’s not sensitive!) drop it in ChatGPT, and in most cases, I barely change anything
I’m in the same boat as @EvolvingRichie regarding AI [vibe coding] with Obsidian, this is a great learning space for anyone getting started and wanting to learn how to code. Sure @DiCaver for maintainability its horrible completely agree, do a plugin/coding in Obsidian can’t be thousands of files [in most cases] so having to rework something isn’t the end of the world in my viewpoint. We have here a space where people can get introduce to coding in a relatively safe space, and if AI is your starting point so be it. Another parallel is in hacking you usually start off being a script kitty and you build your knowledge based cuz your script isn’t working and you learn along the way.
People saying you have to learn programming language/guidelines before you start coding. The act of doing is where it will stick within your mind and have much more success/learning by trying.
Whoever started something [anything in life] and was perfect at it. Nobody ever, you learn, you suceed and you fail so many time more, but that’s the whole point of doing something, you will learn much more from your failures than your success [a byproduct of doing]. So start embracing the journey .
Here an example of what I was about to achieve using Datacore. Using pure code vibes :
Is the code pretty hahahha that’s for you to figure out, does it work? Si si, and the next version will be even better. We need better frameworks/workflows to better utilize AI tools, and there will be a massive growth in this space in the coming years.
So be creative, be adventurous and learn everyday.
I like the idea of using it for personal management projects or workflow improvements a ton more than the amount of projects I’m seeing published out to the public and I see a really cool space for AI to exist as homework helpers in a programming environment trained to provide code as well as coach and help train the user - Obsidian would be a great environment to have a coaching tool active in and to develop tools for since the platform’s working logic easily transfers to other tools.
It would be really cool to look at use cases in Obsidian with solutions that have a project that has to be built/customized for it and see if there are any ways to build out a few resources with an AI that could be available for a user to build out tools from the repetoire from scratch.
And I know you don’t need to pretrain a model to code something for Obsidian but my big anxiety about the current wild west is people who aren’t trained deploying products without doing due dilligence on testing these tools for security/stability/potential legal compliance issues/etc. - not because I believe they are acting maliciously necessarily, but because they don’t know what they are looking for and assume the market will do it for them. Being able to stage an AI that has their responses calibrated and is encouraged to follow best practices would benefit users working with AI who are developing a skillset.
My experience so far has been that coding with AI is an incredibly frustrating process. I haven’t spent any sincere amount of time to create a workflow to do so or done a lot of research it has purely been off the cuff queries to a few different AI to see what would happen. What I’ve received amounted to a similar amount of work to how I initially learned how to code: wanted to do X, took code from program Y that did similar task and played around in the guts until I understood what broke what thing. With AI I go over project and then have to wiggle the AI’s output around and figure out how to get it working from a broken state which honestly is more difficult.
Obsidian is perfect for this. Which is why I’d never try another software (and maybe learn Lua or anything else).
Over time, some of the Javascript, CSS styling etc. start to rub on you and broaden your horizons to ask for stuff to be written that would not have crossed your mind before.
Also, Claude.ai (and probably to a lesser extent ChatGPT?) has a fair amount of knowledge of Obsidian API by 2025 and it seems I no longer need to hunt for pieces of API code from the forum to have AI build around it; it’s just there.
Otherwise it’s still a good idea to go to GitHub pages of plugins and show the .ts files to AI (be it Cursor Editor or good old VS Code Editor which latter comes with a generous free tier) to get some of the code necessary for your plugins or scripts.
Sometimes it takes something like 5-10 mins (2,3?) to have a new script (like yesterday, a draggable pop-up modal for current file’s git commit history with red and green lines showing BEFORE and AFTER) written that works straight away and the customization is 10-30 mins more until you think this is the end of it.
Need a good prompt of course, show other files with bits of code, etc. I was not doing this for the first time!
As I wrote elsewhere I no longer use Templater for scripts, only CodeScript Toolkit, which lets me make modals in .ts.
I do not wish to make full-blown plugins of my own for 300-500 lines of code with CONFIG available on the top of my scripts (to change repos, folders, etc.) as I already have 100 plugins in the vaults, half of which enabled.
When I share my code, I usually state they are machine-made. It’s good to show it to other AI and customize it. So takers don’t need to use it as they are.
Looking at state of the forum in the last year or so, I suspect most Obsidian users are pretty hard at it, talking to AI and getting solutions from it. I can’t believe they ditched Obsidian or migrated to Mars.
) … “I” will not be afraid to maintain it for “next generation of Obsidian users” once Obsidian users are over your head 
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